Top News of the Week

The modular molecular composite nanosystems (MMCNs) route to atomically precise productive nanosystems could benefit from a new modular method of constructing DNA nanotubes that provides control of the geometry of the nanotube cross-section (for example, triangular or square) and may enable real-time modulation of the stiffness and porosity of the nanotube…

In results that augur well for nanotech uses for graphene, two research groups have published in the same issue of Nature two different ways to unzip carbon nanotubes to create graphene ribbons, which heretofore have been more difficult than carbon nanotubes to produce in quantity…

Evolution has adapted what were the bones of the fingers of the bat's ancestors to form the skeleton of its wing. Similarly, in technology, when one element of a system is capable of expanding to take up new functions, it can substitute for what might have been expected to be different ways to achieve the same end…

A nanotech-based gene-therapy method that dramatically improved the efficiency of conventional cancer therapy in animal models is now undergoing clinical trials. The method works by restoring the function of a normal gene that causes badly damaged cells to commit suicide, but which is usually lost in cancer cells, thus permitting them to escape destruction…

As I pointed out in Nanotechnology Without Engines, nanotechnology's promise of being a revolutionary rather than evolutionary technology was based on two key ideas… you start with a desktop system capable of replicating itself and make smaller and smaller copies.
With this in mind, consider the RepRap…

Advancements in technologies such as nanotech, robotics, and biotech are promising to make major differences in our lives in the not-too-distant future, as the Industrial Revolution did to the agrarian world — to do for the physical world what the computer and Internet have done to the world of information.

Since 1986, the Foresight Institute has been in the forefront of a worldwide community of visionaries who work to help shape these possibilities into a positive, beneficial reality. If you would like to help us understand the potential of these technologies, and influence their direction, please consider becoming a member of the Foresight community. With your support, Foresight will continue to educate the general public on these technologies and what they will mean to our society.

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